This week, the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) will run another forum, "The Futures of Frederick Douglass," on its online journal Black Perspectives. The last forum took place at the end of last November and included contributions from Christopher Bonner, David Blight, Manisha Sinha, Noelle Trent, and my own piece about Anna Douglass. That roundtable focused on the life and legacy of Douglass. This one will turn to the future of the study of Douglass.
The organizers are the same scholars who put together the conference in Paris last October, Helene Quanquin, Cecile Roudeau, and Michael Roy. (Helene will have a fantastic book coming out about men in the women's rights movement that will include Frederick Douglass next year, by the way.) Participants include Brigitte Fielder; P. Gabrielle Forman, whose Colored Conventions Project has been a great boon; Kay Wright Lewis; Robert Levine, whose Lives of Frederick Douglass is one of the most thoughtful books on Douglass's autobiographies and has a great piece on Douglass in Rome; Ezra Greenspan, who wrote a careful and insightful biography of William Wells Brown and is now looking at the wide network of Douglass's family; and Ronald Johnson, who focuses on the Atlantic World and Haiti. Oh, yes, and my lovely husband Douglas R. Egerton, who has written about slave rebels, African Americans in the American Revolution, the 1860 election, Black Reconstruction, and a Lincoln Prize-winning book about the Massachusetts 54th. Douglass popped up a lot in the last three, of course.
In other words, this should be a fascinating week of posts!
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